


Recursion

by monsterkiss



Category: Drag-On Dragoon | Drakengard, NieR: Automata (Video Game), Nier Gestalt | Nier
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-18 12:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21994027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/monsterkiss/pseuds/monsterkiss
Summary: Zero's existence had never been simple, straightforward, easy. But at least it belonged to her. She lived a miserable, pointless life, but she died knowing who she was.Now she's fractured and dispersed, and she can never be certain who she will be, moment to moment.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 56





	Recursion

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for [hollowedmemories](https://hollowedmemories.tumblr.com/) for the Drakenier Exchange 2019! It seems to be my thing this year to get given a bunch of characters to choose from and just. Writing all of them. Enjoy!

It was always the fucking flower.

When she woke up from her dream, or nightmare or vision of fugue state, whatever, she knew immediately what was to blame. The wretched weed had a seemingly endless catalogue of ways to piss her off, and she was beginning to suspect that it was deliberately trying to hurt her, or drive her mad. The thing had to had some kind of brain, some drives behind its intent. Certainly it had desires, desires it pissed endlessly into her mind.

“Hey, Zero. Did you have another bad dream?”

She pushed herself up on her lumpy bed, flexed her left arm, still new and itchy, and turned her one remaining eye onto the dragon currently attempting to stick its snout through the door of her shack.

“Were you watching me sleep again, you creep?”

“Wah! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” The snout immediately retracted, taking part of the door frame with it.

She considered going after him for further beration, but decided against it. The vision had left her tired and a little shaken.

* * *

It had been another one about the possessed woman. Long, slightly gangly limbs, a pretty face that didn’t so much smile as flash its teeth, and, of course, the… other physical attribute. Coarse and bloodthirsty, doomed and driven and dressed, if you could even call it that, in barely enough material to make a napkin. Zero had no idea what any of that was supposed to symbolise in these dream stories the flower subjected her to, but she kinda liked this character, at least. Most of the time.

This time she was making another camp, setting up a rough and shoddy tent and setting a fire with more than a little glee. She sat back, enjoying her handiwork., the grass tickling her skin through her sparse clothing.

“Hey, Kainé, oh, did you finish already?”

She turned her head towards the voice. The skeleton creature, its body draped in a smock, its face wide and round and somehow a little timid.

“Yeah. You wanna cook tonight? He left us some nice leftovers to warm up.”

The skull nodded. “It looks like this area is clear of shades, at least for now.”

“Good. Getting woken up by those fuckers and having to squash them gets boring fast.”

She shifted a little to the side to make room for the strange being. There was plenty of space around the fire, but she wanted to let him know he could come near. He needed that, she knew. 

He did sit down next to her. They heated up the lamb and vegetables and sat eating in a companionable silence.

One of the things that pissed her off the most about these dreams in particular was the air. It tasted wrong. She wondered how the characters could tolerate it.

“Playing at families, Kainé? Getting sentimental on me?”

That was another one. The disembodied voice with its cynical drawl. At first she had wondered if even her host could hear it, but over time she had learnt to see the signs. The irritable sigh, now, for example.

“Kainé?”

“Nothing, Emil.”

The woman lay back in the grass, picking a bit of meat out of her teeth as she watched the stars. 

The stars were wrong, too.

“Kainé?”

“I said it’s nothing.”

“No, I wanted to ask you something else.” The bone creature never reacted to her coarse manner. She couldn’t tell if it was a learned endurance or the understanding that it was more a dialect than a mood.

“Sure, kid. Ask.”

The bones shuffled. “Why are you here?”

Her face scrunched. “I don’t give much of a shit about philosophy.”

“I mean, why are you out here, with me?”

She shrugged. “You know why. I’m an outcast, a freak, a monster from under their kids’ piss-stained mattresses. They’d never let me into any of the towns.”

“Hm…” The skeleton boy lay back next to her. “But, if you went far enough away, where they didn’t know you, you could. You look human; they can’t tell you’re possessed.”

She rolled onto her side, squinting at the creature. 

“He really is naive, huh, girl?” the voice sneered.

She ripped up some blades of grass. Finally, she said, “It’s not about that, kid. I was a monster long before any of this.” She plucked at her bandages. “And as soon as they find out why, they’ll turn into slavering, barking animals. Fuck ‘em.” She turned back to the alien sky. “They’re not worth it.”

The creature didn’t say anything more. They lay together in the warm night, it’s skeletal fingers only slightly brushing the back of her bandaged hand.

* * *

Sometimes it was her sisters.

She’d been all of them at some point or another. She’d experienced Five’s tiresome decadence until she couldn’t stand the thought of food or sex for days afterward. She’d been bored to tears by Four’s bland piety. She’d been up to her elbows in so many of Three’s creations that there was no longer a single sight, sound or bodily fluid that bothered her. She’d waltzed through Two’s torturous make-believe romance. She’d wandered cold, empty halls as One, and learnt nothing.

Sometimes she seemed to be another One, a woman in drab but practical attire, giving pointless charity to the whining masses, or a One who was a man, staring at a wall. What that bullshit was about she had no idea; perhaps the flower itself was hallucinating.

* * *

Sometimes she was heavy.

The woman who lived in the ruined world, where earth, water and vegetation were stealing back cityscapes populated by nothing but whirring toys, she was heavy. Zero could feel the weight of her body when she moved, though she moved it effortlessly.

She leapt, ran and climbed around the broken world. She danced with her swords and spears and screaming bloodlust, smashing apart the little toys that nipped ineffectively at her heels. She couldn’t quite explain why their existence grated on her so; they were no match for her in the slightest. But she hated them and she felt better to know that they could die, and she could make it happen.

Her hair was long and wild, her body encased in some kind of shell, like the carapace of a crab, but infinitely more flexible. Scraps of cloth clung to the armor, a stronger material than she’d ever seen used in clothing, but light. She did not need to eat or sleep in these dreams, and spoke only in snarls.

She spent hour after hour wandering up a mountainside, tireless. Reaching the peak under the light of the moon she turned, her long hair whipping around her. Her eyes could see impossibly far, could see, two peaks away, a large and bulky toy awkwardly shambling along through the scrub, stumbling and wobbling on the uneven terrain.

She began to walk.

* * *

Sometimes she was the same woman, but in a dress and a blindfold that did not seem to hamper her vision, her hair a neat bob. 

This one spoke constantly, if only by comparison. There were others like her, in the same silly outfit but equally as fast and strong and brutal in their destruction of the army of toys. 

She also took orders. Zero didn’t like that.

This time she had been ordered to a vast field of snow, the tedious white bullshit coming so thick and fast that she would not have been able to see anything without her supernaturally good eyes. But she was not cold, even in the ridiculous outfit. 

She wasn’t alone, either. There was the curious metal box that hovered around her like a horsefly waiting for a bite of flesh, and...

“Hey 2B! Wait up!”

The boy seemed similarly immune to cold, in body and in spirit. His voice was just as bright and annoying as it had been hours earlier, when they’d flown down from the stars to this miserable icey shithole.

“The enemy is still over two kilometres out. We need to keep moving.”

“My motor mechanism aren’t as well-optimised as yours. My legs are shorter.”

“All planetside units have equal mobility capabilities.”

“But we can still talk while we walk, right?”

“No.”

They marched on through the tundra for hours, tireless. The flying box seemed to he helping them navigate, through some kind of scrying magic of its own. Its flat, dead voice pissed her off.

“Hey, 2B?”

“I said no talking.”

“Look.”

She followed the boy’s outstretched arm to a great mountain buried in the interminable snow. 

No, not a mountain. The silhouette was wrong. As she stared at it, it suddenly came to her that this was, in fact, a huge… building? Ship? The remains of some great beast? She had no frame of reference that would help her know which one.

“We’re close.”

They walked on, one foot in front of the other, hour after hour.

Finally: “I’m picking it up. It’s straight ahead!”

With renewed vigour they sprinted to the edge of the next bluff, the boy pulling ahead. Just as she reached the peak, something caught her foot, and looking down she saw some sort of metal pipe. Kicking it roughly aside, she realised that it was an arm. A skinless metal body gazed vacantly up at her.

She turned away and walked on.

“I don’t get it, 2B. It doesn’t make sense. This is definitely the machine life form, but…” As she reached the apex she could see the twisted, alien, impossibly vast body in the crater below. “It’s not active. It must have been destroyed on the initial assault; the only thing giving off any signals is the core. Why hasn’t that drawn any other machines in? They usually-”

The boy stopped and looked down, arms that had been animated and busy a moment ago going limp. She redoubled her grip on her sword and dragged it back out.

“Doesn’t m-make…”

The boy’s body collapsed and began slowly sliding into the crater, a dark trail spreading in its wake.

She watched it awhile, her sword’s point low. Then she turned and began the long walk back. 

Soon, the snow would have covered it all.

* * *

It was always the fucking flower.

Zero had never had many peaceful nights. Not many peaceful days either, for that matter. But ever since she’d got that shitty little weed inside her, every moment she was alive made her want to tear her own body apart just to be free of it.

Of course, that wouldn’t be enough.

These visions were not the most painful things she’d ever gone through, but they were certainly the cruellest. As if her own life wasn’t wretched and miserable enough, now she had to endure endless permutations of it, different bodies, different worlds, the same pain. It was ridiculous to believe that a plant could have emotions, but if it were capable of any of them, it was spite, and in vast quantities.

She took a deep breath, trying to resist the urge to break one of the few objects in her home that she had not already brutalised. Eventually she settled for slamming the door as she left. She had plenty of spare hinges, anyway.

It was another mild, pleasant day. Birds sang their obnoxious little songs and bugs fluttered through the air. She crouched down and dug her fingers into the dirt, feeling it on her skin, under her nails. 

She was here.

Glancing up she saw Mikhail, snoozing with his face in a patch of shade. Slowly, quietly, she got to her feet and walked towards him, her bare soles silent on the soft grass.

She placed a hand on his flank and closed her eyes, listening to his great bellowing breaths. Feeling the pulse of his dragon heart, strong in spite of his age.

Not a tainted, twisted monster she had failed, as One failed her dragon. Not a sad, brittle little child with a permanent skeletal grin. Not boy so blinded by his devotion and cleverness that he couldn’t feel the point of a sword at his back.

A dragon. A partner. A promise she and Micheal had made.

She opened her eyes.

She was here.


End file.
